marcosolo, 11. Mai 2003 um 14:08:22 MESZ

FTW Special Report on SARS

Combining Biological and Economic Warfare

by Michael C. Ruppert and Wayne Madsen

[For more than a year and a half FTW has been examining the relationships between these developments:

The attacks of 9/11; Biowarfare, starting with the anthrax attacks of 2001, later proven to have used a strain of the disease developed by the CIA;

The mysterious deaths of as many as 15 world-class microbiologists specializing in infectious diseases and DNA sequencing since 9/11;

The rush to enact unwarranted, draconian public health measures including MEHPA, The Patriot Act, and the Homeland Security Act which have violated the constitution and given the government the right to forcibly vaccinate or quarantine American citizens and to confiscate property without due process; The documentary record of US, Israeli and South African attempts to develop gene-specific bioweapons; and

The reality that an irreversible peak and decline in global oil and gas production would cause a massive overshoot of population that could not be fed or managed with rapidly disappearing, non-renewable energy supplies which no amount of demand could replace. The end game of this decline would be direct competition between the United States and China, which are destined to be consuming as much as eighty per cent of the world's oil production by the middle of the century.

Back in November of 2001 I had concluded, based upon scientific data, that Peak Oil was real. It was apparent that the world's population had already overshot the decline and that this was going to be increasingly difficult to conceal. Events since that time, world oil production data and reports from CNNHN and the BBC have proven this correct. I also concluded, along with several other researchers, that one possible contingency plan developed by the world's elites was consistent with an option that had been discussed by scientists looking at Peak Oil issues as long as ten years ago – reduce the world's population by as much as 4 billion people using biological warfare. Reduction to 2 billion represents sustainable food production levels demonstrated before petroleum energy and natural gas (ammonia) changed agriculture. I mentioned this likelihood in my first post-9/11 lecture at Portland State University in November of 2001. That was before most of the above events had taken place or were even known.

With much of my earlier research having since been validated, it is fair to ask if the SARS virus fits into this scenario. The answer is that it does and it doesn't. It is becoming clear that economic and military stresses caused as nations position themselves for the end of the age of oil raise the possibility of a global conflict which could be just as deadly as the energy famine itself. In other words, competition for energy might be as destructive as not having enough. Full public acknowledgement by the markets of the reality of Peak Oil could produce chaos long before shortages become acute. So one requirement that must be addressed in the "management" of Peak Oil is how to reduce demand and weaken the competition without disclosing the underlying issue.

In this role, SARS fits the bill perfectly because it has successfully terrified much of the world's population, weakened the Chinese economy and set the stage for more deadly diseases while avoiding the real issue. SARS serves the role of something long-practiced in covert operations and warfare – a dry run on serious population reduction and management. Ultimately something will give. And ultimately – as people begin to starve – population issues will have to be addressed, both in terms of number and in terms of maintaining order. SARS, while most likely not the agent envisioned by some scientists as the "big one", conveniently serves the dual purpose of conditioning populations for the time when forced vaccinations may accomplish the task or when they will be told to surrender all personal liberties as a more deadly disease occupies the stage.

But to think of SARS only in that context is to miss a great many other "side effects" of the disease, not the least of which is the fact that it forces China to accept western medical and business practices favored by globalized financial interests and the pharmaceutical industry. It also strengthens the political clout of China's new leader Hu Jintao as he is forced to respond decisively.

As I have noted many times US-Chinese relationships are a double-edged sword. While China will ultimately become the US's main competitor for energy, capitalism demands debt, growth and increased sales to avoid collapse. China has long been recognized as the last great market for capitalist expansion. China is the market that US corporations like Motorola, Microsoft, GM, IBM, Intel, AIG and the pharmaceutical companies need to sustain growth, support share prices and pay dividends. While SARS appears to be hurting the short-term interests of some American corporations it may ultimately prove to be a bonanza for the WTO, the World Bank and the financial engines that can use debt and "transparency" to shift some of the west's economic weakness by lending dollars and compelling China adopt western practices.

The questions then are whether SARS is manmade and how it is man used. The answers, especially considering the US's history of engineering bioweapons and some very pronounced links to 9/11, are not reassuring. And there are lingering connections to the research work of the recently deceased microbiologists.

To access FTW's previous reporting on these issues please visit: www.fromthewilderness.com and look under the headings of Oil, Biowarfare and Civil Liberties. – MCR]

Michael C. Ruppert May 9, 2003

 

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marcosolo, 6. Mai 2003 um 18:44:50 MESZ

annual report on press freedom 2002 UNITED STATES

Surface area : 9,363,123 sq. km. Population : 283,230,000 Languages : English (official) Type of State : federal republic

UNITED STATES - Annual report 2002

Nine journalists or media assistants were killed in the 11 September attacks. Some government responses to the event seriously affected the media. Journalists were detained, the press was coerced, new anti-terrorist measures curbed freedom and the media in Afghanistan was attacked. The right to keep sources confidential was not always respected by the courts. One journalist was jailed for having chosen to defend this right in a federal court.

The 11 September 2001 attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York perhaps caused more damage to press freedom in the United States than in any other country. First because nine journalists or media assistants were killed, and then because many restrictions were imposed on journalists wanting to cover the rescue operations or take pictures of Ground Zero, the disaster site. Oddly, the attacks killed nearly 3,000 people but not a single photograph of any of the bodies was shown. The US authorities relied on the self-censorship of the US media, which chose not to show "shocking" pictures. After President George W. Bush's 20 September speech in which he called for a "war on terrorism," he was also able to count on their patriotic feelings. "America's new war" (CBS), "The war against terror" (CNN) and "America strikes back" (CBS) were the slogans, always accompanied by an American flag in the corner of the screen. "If the media have sometimes lacked objectivity, it was not under official pressure," said Paul Khlebnikov, of the economic magazine Forbes. But such pressure soon appeared as the country's military operation in Afghanistan began. "Recommendations" were made to the public radio station Voice of America and then to US television stations asking them not to give too much say to "enemies of America." Confidentiality of the Internet was seriously undermined by the passage in late October of the "USA Patriot Act" authorising the FBI to monitor e-mail exchanges between suspects without permission from a judge.

The military operations in Afghanistan led to other attacks on press freedom, including constant and increasing pressure on the Qatari TV station Al Jazeera, which was accused of giving too much air time to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and encouraging anti-American feeling in the Middle East. The US criticism chimed with that from several authoritarian Arab regimes who feared the station for giving a voice to their domestic opponents. The US government then tried to restrict access to information about the military operations when it bought up all the pictures of the fighting taken by the Ikonos satellite, virtually the only accurate non-military record of the damage done by the US military strikes. US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to dissuade officials from giving information to the media. In Afghanistan, American forces bombed the Afghan radio and TV headquarters. The offices of Al Jazeera, the BBC and the Associated Press (AP) news agency were also hit during the attack on Kabul. US Special Forces tried to keep reporters away from the Tora Bora region when they suspected Bin Laden was hiding there.

Until 11 September, the year had been marked by several episodes that seriously undermined the right of journalists not to reveal their sources. During a justice department enquiry into violation of secrecy in legal investigations, the telephone records of an AP journalist were examined without his knowledge, which outraged the agency when it was officially told about it several months later. The justice department said it had obtained journalists' phone records on eight occasions since 1991 and added that over the same period, 60 journalists had been ordered to give court evidence or produce documents in their possession.

One of them, Vanessa Leggett, was jailed in 2001 for contempt for refusing to reveal her sources to a federal grand jury in Houston (Texas). She was still in jail at the end of the year, when her 165 days in detention was the longest time in US history that a journalist had been imprisoned for contempt of court.

Two journalists killed

The body of freelance photographer William Biggart was found in the ruins of the World Trade Center on 15 September 2001. He had gone to there immediately after the attacks and he and the firemen he was with were killed when the second tower collapsed. Biggart worked for Impact Visuals Agency (since 1998) and also for The Village Voice, The City Sun and The Christian Science Monitor newspapers.

Robert Stevens, a photographer for The Sun, a tabloid in Boca Raton (Florida) belonging to the American Media Co. (AMC) group, died of pulmonary anthrax on 5 October, the first recorded case in the US since 1976. He is thought to have caught it after handling a letter that arrived at the paper's offices on 19 September addressed to actress Jennifer Lopez and containing a bluish powder. Anthrax spores were found on the journalist's computer keyboard. The origin of the letter and the motive for sending it remain unknown.

Eight media assistants killed

Several engineers working for broadcasting firms with offices at the top of the north tower of the New York World Trade Center were killed during the 11 September 2001 attack that demolished the Center. They were Isaias Rivera and Bob Pattison of WCBS-TV, William Steckman of WNBC-TV, Donald Di Franco of WABC-TV, Steve Jacobson of WPIX and Rod Coppola of WNET-TV. Alex Braginsky and Geoffrey Thomas Campbell, of the commercial service of Reuters news agency, were also killed.

Four journalists jailed

A British photographer, Steve Morgan, and Jorge Torres, a Spanish cameraman working mainly for the Mercury Press International agency, were arrested on 14 July 2001 while covering a protest by 15 Greenpeace militants against the testing of the new US anti-missile shield at Vandenberg Air Force Base (California). The protest forced a delay in the test. The two journalists and the Greenpeace militants were arrested and held in Los Angeles and risk being jailed for up to 11 years and fines of up to $500,000 (580,000 euros) if found guilty of "conspiring to violate a safety zone" and trespassing and failure to obey an order." Torres was freed on bail on 17 July and Morgan five days later.

Vanessa Leggett, a writer and freelance journalist, was jailed on 20 July after being convicted the previous day for contempt of court by a federal grand jury in Houston (Texas). She had refused to give the court her notes and tapes of interviews made while investigating the April 1997 murder of a Texas millionaire's wife with the aim of writing a book about it. She had spoken to the wife's brother-in-law, a suspect in the murder, shortly before he killed himself. On 17 August, a Houston appeals court upheld her conviction on grounds that journalists could not refuse to testify before a grand jury. The conviction was upheld by another appeals court on 13 November and her lawyer said the case would be taken to the federal supreme court. By year-end, she had been in jail for 165 days, the longest time in US history a journalist has been imprisoned for contempt of court. William Farr, of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, was jailed for 46 days in 1972 for having refused to reveal his sources in court.

Ian Austin, a photographer of the Aurora Quanta Productions agency, was arrested on 28 September and freed three days later without any charges being brought. He had entered the security area established around the ruins of the New York World Trade Center after the 11 September attacks. "The police told me they were going to make an example of me," he said. The US Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) said at least four journalists had been arrested and accused of breaking the rules about entering the site. Journalists from the Dallas Daily News all had their accreditation cancelled after one of the paper's photographers was arrested and accused of "misconduct."

A journalist arrested

The Washington correspondent of the Qatari TV station Al Jazeera, Mohammed Al-Alami, was arrested at Waco airport, in Texas, on 14 November 2001 after he arrived to cover a meeting between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Police with M-16 automatic rifles followed as I was leaving the airport and arrested me," he said. Al-Alami showed police his US passport and his accreditation to no avail. Because his credit card had been used in Afghanistan to buy his plane ticket, police refused to let him leave the airport. He was freed a few hours later after intervention by US intelligence officials. The FBI said his arrest was a case of mistaken identity. In previous weeks, the management of Al Jazeera had come under great pressure from US officials because of its coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

Journalists attacked

A dozen media employees were contaminated in October 2001 by anthrax or received suspicious mail at the Boca Raton (Florida) offices of the American Media Co. (AMC) and at several national media offices in New York. After the death of AMC photographer Robert Stevens from the disease on 5 October, seven other AMC employees went down with it. Mailroom worker Ernesto Blanco contracted the pulmonary version of the disease but the six others who came into contact with anthrax spores did not develop the disease. Fear gripped New York on 12 October when it was learned that Erin O'Connor, of NBC TV, had been infected with the less serious cutaneous form of anthrax. She appeared to have caught it on 18 September when she opened a letter containing brown granules addressed to top evening news presenter Tom Brokaw. The same day, Judith Miller, the New York Times specialist on terrorism and the Middle East, received a letter containing a suspicious white powder. The offices of the two media organisations were immediately evacuated and closed for several hours while they were searched and staff were told they would be tested for the disease. Also the same day, most major media organisations said they would temporarily suspend all mail operations, with CBS, CNN and AOL Time Warner closing their mailrooms. Between 18 and 26 October, three other employees of CBS and NBC and the daily New York Post were found to have the cutaneous form of the disease. In subsequent days, several spores were found in letters addressed to politicians, including Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. The Capitol, which includes the Senate and the House of Representatives, was thoroughly searched. By the end of the year, US authorities had concluded that the anthrax spores found in the mail sent to the Senate and the media originated in the US, but they did not know who was responsible.

Pressure and obstruction

In early August 2001, the White House said it would no longer cooperate with Lloyd Grove, a Washington Post columnist and contributor to Talk magazine. The White House press office said magazines like Talk were "disrespectful" and "openly mocked" the desire of the president and his wife to protect the privacy of their twin daughters. A few days earlier, the magazine had printed photos of supermodels pretending to be the Bush twins behind prison bars. In May, the daughters were caught by police drinking illegally in a bar after lying about their ages.

John Solomon, of the Associated Press (AP) news agency, was informed in writing by US attorney Mary Jo White that the justice department had obtained details of his telephone calls between 2 and 7 May 2001 as part of an enquiry into violations of secrecy in legal investigations. In a story he wrote on 4 May, Solomon quoted anonymous law enforcement officials who said a phone conversation involving Sen. Robert Torricelli had been recorded as part of a probe into election campaign funding. This was information protected by legal secrecy rules. AP president Louis D. Boccardi said he was "outraged" that the phone records had been sought. Federal regulations allows a journalists' phone records to be obtained only after "all reasonable alternatives" have been exhausted. Some questioned whether this rule had been followed, since the request for the records was made less than 10 days after the news story appeared.

Only a few hours after the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, FBI agents went to the offices of the Internet service providers AOL, Earthlink and Hotmail to install the Carnivore programme on their equipment so as to monitor the e-mail messages of their customers in the hope of finding traces of those responsible for the attacks. Many US civil liberties organisations fear the fight against terrorism will lead to a government ban on the use of encryption technology that guarantees confidentiality of e-mail.

In the wake of the 11 September attacks, a complex system of accreditation was set up by police and the army for journalists wanting to go to Ground Zero, the World Trade Center disaster site. The daily Los Angeles Times said police began confiscating the film of photographers and tourists near the site on 19 September. Many photographers had their access permits withdrawn for not obeying the rules at the site. Don Emmert, the New York photo editor of the French news agency Agence France-Presse, said the system of access was "like a police state." He said photographers organised themselves into pools. "We are only allowed to film what they want us to film," he said. "Those free to move around are military photographers of the US Navy and those from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who give the agencies some very nice pictures, but none that showed bodies. The mayor's office once asked us not to use a photo of firemen watching as the body of one of their colleagues was taken away from the ruins."

In mid-September, the US State Department, which is represented on the board of the Voice of America radio station, asked other board members not to allow an interview with Taliban leader Mullah Omar to be broadcast on 21 September. "Voice of America is not the voice of Mullah Omar and not the voice of the Taliban," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. "It would be inappropriate to spend taxpayers' money to broadcast the comments of the leader of the movement protecting the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks." A Voice of America official said extracts from the interview were part of a more general report that also included comments by US officials and an expert on Islam and the position of the Northern Alliance, and that Mullah Omar had said in it that he did not think Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. The programme finally went out on 25 September despite the State Department request. Two months later, the station's managing editor, Bob Reilly, asked his editors to comply with a congressional bill barring the station from broadcasting interviews with "any official of nations that sponsor terrorism or any representative or member of terrorist organizations."

President Bush, citing national security reasons, instructed senior members of his government on 5 October to stop passing confidential information to members of Congress for fear of "leaks" to the press. A few days earlier, the daily Washington Post had reported that members of Congress had been told a new terrorist attack on the United States was very likely. The president withdrew his instruction after hostile reaction from the Congress.

Secretary of state Colin Powell said on CBS television on 10 October that the Qatari TV station Al Jazeera was giving an "undue amount of time and attention to vitriolic and irresponsible statements." After the first US air strikes in Afghanistan began on 7 October, Al Jazeera broadcast a statement by Bin Laden vowing that the United States would "never be safe." A State Department official commented : "Yes to freedom, but we think it's beyond the pale to provide an open platform for these sorts of violent ideas. We're concerned everywhere that Osama bin Laden not to be able to use the media to spread his ideas." On 3 October, Powell had called on the ruler of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the station's main shareholder, to make it change its news coverage. The previous day, the US ambassador to Qatar had accused Al Jazeera of biased coverage of the 11 September events and of encouraging anti-American feeling in the Middle East. The station, which has had a permanent office in Kabul since 1998, was one of the few media that stayed in the Afghan capital and the southern city of Kandahar.

Fearing Bin Laden would use his TV appearances to spread propaganda or pass coded messages to his supporters, the White House asked US TV stations on 10 October not to broadcast him directly. "At best, Osama bin Laden's message is propaganda. At worst, he could be issuing orders to his followers to initiate such attacks," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on 10 October. The next day, the government asked the leading US newspapers not to carry Bin Laden's statements in full.

It was disclosed in mid-October that the Pentagon had arranged, from the start of the air attacks, to buy up all the pictures taken by the Ikonos satellite of the US military operation in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom. The agreement barred Space Imaging, owners of Ikonos, from "selling, distributing, sharing or providing" the photos to anyone else, thus blocking the many requests for them by the media. Joan Mears, of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which made the agreement, said the aim was to ensure access to any picture taken of Operation Enduring Freedom. The British daily The Guardian said on 17 October said the US had no need of the pictures itself because it had six photo satellites in orbit, plus a seventh launched the previous week. Four of the satellites, called Keyholes, took photographs between six and 10 times sharper than the one-metre resolution pictures taken by Ikonos. Ikonos supplies the sharpest pictures among non-military satellites.

Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on 22 October deplored the Washington Post's publication on 19 October of information about the movements of the US army's Special Forces units in Afghanistan. He said it was not in the interests of the US to allow Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to know the when, how and why of these operations and accused the paper of endangering the lives of US commandos by revealing their operation before it was complete. He added that he hoped the troops did not find the paper's informant. Such leaks, he said, were a violation of federal criminal law. The Washington Post replied that its policy was to not publish material that could endanger the operations or lives of soldiers and noted that the Pentagon under Rumsfeld had imposed greater restrictions on the media's access to military operations and senior officers than in previous wars.

The US House of Representatives on 24 October overwhelmingly passed the so-called "Patriot" (Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, giving federal authorities great surveillance powers in the fight against terrorism. It enables the FBI to install on an Internet service provider's equipment the Carnivore programme to monitor e-mail exchanges and record the Web activities of a terrorist suspect without needing to get permission from a judge. The measures, signed into law by President Bush on 26 October, also ease rules about phone tapping by the government.

 

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marcosolo, 29. April 2003 um 23:04:49 MESZ

Howard Dean, M.D. is seeking the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

He served as the Governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2002. Dean is a physician who previously shared a medical practice with his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1971 and his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City in 1978. He served in the Vermont House from 1982 to 1986; was elected lieutenant governor in 1986, and became governor in 1991. His campaign website is

www.DeanForAmerica.com.

Equal Rights is the Responsibility of Every American By Governor Howard Dean t r u t h o u t | Exclusive Editorial

Sunday 27 April 2003

George W. Bush ran for President on the promise that he would be a uniter, not a divider.'' Nothing could be further from the truth. Earlier this week, Senator Rick Santorum, the third highest ranking Republican in the Senate, compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery. On Friday, President Bush praised Santorum as an inclusive man.'' With his praise, this President has once again demonstrated his willingness to follow the extremist Republican tradition of dividing our country for political gain. The President knows that his defense of Santorum's inflammatory words deeply offends millions of gay and lesbian Americans, their family and friends; his praise also raises grave concerns about this Administration's commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.

Senator Santorum has called his repugnant remarks ``a legitimate public policy discussion.'' Senator Santorum is wrong. Equating the private, consensual activities of adults to the molestation of minors is not a policy discussion. It is gay-bashing, and it is immoral.

Senator Santorum asserted that the government has the right ``to limit individuals' wants and passions.'' While the government has the right to protect citizens from the harmful acts of others, as well as an obligation to promote the general welfare of all people, I do not believe that it is the proper role of government to step into the private bedrooms of consenting adults. The continuous assault by right-wing radicals on the privacy of ordinary Americans must stop.

Senator Santorum must step down from his leadership post. His failure to recognize that it is wrong to attack people because of which group they belong to makes him unfit to hold a leadership position in the United States Senate.

The issue at hand is about more than Senator Santorum's reprehensible statements, however, and the issue is also about more than the dignity and respect of gay and lesbian Americans.

The issue is whether we, as Americans, will continue to allow ourselves to be led down a path by this Administration to a country that is divided against itself by race, income, gender, sexual orientation and religion.

Senator Santorum's remarks do not exist in isolation. In January, President Bush went on national television to discuss the Supreme Court's hearing of the University of Michigan's affirmative action case. One of the most despicable moments of this President's Administration occurred when, on national prime time television, he used the word "quotas" repeatedly to describe the University of Michigan's admissions policy.

President Bush knows that the University of Michigan does not now have, and has never had, quotas. His use of the race-loaded word "quota" is intended to incite people's fears of losing their jobs, or their positions in America's leading universities, to minorities. Such rhetoric, which is designed to appease the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and to appeal to Americans' worst instincts, betrays the guiding principle that America is a nation in which all people are created equal.

Achieving this equality requires moral leadership. It sometimes requires standing against your party's base. It is not moral leadership when the third highest ranking Republican in the Senate intimates that the sexual abuse of minors is no different than the consensual acts of adults, and the President's spokesperson responds by praising that man for ``doing a good job as Senator.''

Three years ago, I signed into law the civil unions bill, a law that guarantees same-sex couples in Vermont the same legal rights as married couples. The Vermont Supreme Court in December of 1999 held that gay and lesbian people were not being provided with equal rights in our state. An hour and a half after that court issued its decision, I told the press and the people of Vermont that I would support a bill making our state the first in the country to provide all Americans with equality under the law. At the time, approximately 35% of the people favored the bill, and 60% were opposed.

I signed the civil unions bill because it was the right thing to do. Those of us who came of age during the civil rights movement have long understood that the strength of America lies in our commitment to equal rights under the law for everyone. Civil unions provide equal inheritance rights, equal hospital visitation rights, and equal insurance rights. Every legal right that I have as a married person, anybody in Vermont can have, including gays and lesbians. Today, Vermont is the only place in America where equal rights under the law means equal rights under the law for every citizen, not just for the people we like or the people we're comfortable with or the people who look like us.

President Bush's and Senator Santorum's remarks remind us that while laws may guarantee equal rights, laws alone do not create equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees equal rights for minorities in this country, but the law did not end racism and prejudice. The civil unions law guarantees equal rights for same-sex couples in Vermont, but the law did not end discrimination toward gays and lesbians.

Creating equality for all requires the personal responsibility of everyone. As Americans, we can no longer tolerate politics of division and still hope to achieve the promise of equality envisioned by our Founding Fathers. The dream of equal rights for all Americans will only be realized when all of us-whether in the corridors of power or in the hallways of our schools and offices-come together to create a community in which bigotry and hatred is cast out from the forum of public discourse. I believe equal rights can be achieved, but it will only be achieved when we have leaders in the highest offices of the land who stop pandering to bigots in exchange for a handful of votes.

 

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